Refugees, it seems, are scary. The movement of people fleeing violence and oppression attracts sympathy, but increasingly also fear. We hear talk of “carnage” and “chaos” at the US border as Central Americans flee political violence; the EU agrees to limit asylum-seekers; the UK plans to deport all asylum-seekers to Rwanda; in last year’s Turkish election, both President Erdoğan and his challenger promised to send home millions of Syrian refugees. Amidst these challenges to the global refugee regime, many turn to its founding documents, dating to the aftermath of World War II. Scholars of humanitarianism suggest the system’s roots lie a quarter-century earlier, in American and Western European responses to the collapse of the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires.1 In either case, the emergence of a legal regime for managing refugees is seen as driven by western, and particularly Christian, sympathies and solidarities. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s new book challenges that view, arguing that as early as the 1850s, the Ottoman Empire—a state ruled by Muslims and often seen as outside the European world—“created its own nonwestern and nonsecular system of categorizing, sheltering, and resettling refugees.” (P. 3.)
Hamed-Troyansky makes this argument as part of a larger study of the immense migration (over a million people) of North Caucasian Muslims from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. As the Russians consolidated their control over the Caucasus Mountains, they drove out many of the Muslims who lived there. In particular, the Circassians/Adyghe were extirpated so thoroughly that some have termed it a genocide. Most of these refugees fled to the Ottoman Empire, which responded by creating a legal and bureaucratic system to aid them and resettle them on its lands, from the Balkans to Jordan. Over the following decades, as the Ottoman Empire contracted, the North Caucasians were joined by many more Muslim refugees who fled (or were expelled from) the newly independent states of the Balkans. To tell this story, Hamed-Troyansky relies on a breathtaking diversity and depth of sources: twenty-three archives across ten countries, private papers and letters, and even interviews. He tells stories of imperial politics, local bureaucratic management, urban socioeconomic changes, and family microhistories.
For scholars of law, however, what will be most interesting about Hamed-Troyansky’s work is his reconstruction of the Ottoman refugee system, and what it can tell us about refugee law and politics even in our own day. The Ottoman state had long welcomed those who fled other domains, from Sephardic Jews in the fifteenth century to Hungarian nationalists in the nineteenth. The state’s landmark 1857 Immigration/Refugee (Muhacirin) Law, which inaugurated the Ottoman refugee system, likewise made no religious distinctions. But in practice, Hamed-Troyansky shows, it was sympathy for suffering Muslims that drove “Ottoman humanitarianism.” (P. 69.) Non-Muslim migrants received less help from the state, often required pre-authorization, and were not even referred to as refugees (muhacir). Jewish migration to Palestine attracted particular restrictions. “A refugee being Muslim,” Hamed-Troyansky concludes, “while not a codified requirement, was an expectation and raison d’être of the Ottoman refugee regime.” (P. 5.) In this sympathy for co-religionists, Ottoman humanitarianism looks familiar. Davide Rodogno has argued that European humanitarianism in the nineteenth century was more likely to favor Christian victims;2 India has adopted laws making it harder for Muslim refugees to receive citizenship than for others; and we have seen how some European governments reject Syrian refugees, but welcome Ukrainians.
Hamed-Troyansky also situates his story in its nineteenth-century context: this was an age of globalization and mass migration. Even as Muslim subjects of Russia came to the Ottoman Empire, so did Jewish ones, bound for Palestine; these stories were parallel “in the specific directionality and religious mandate of emigration as well as in their origins in persecution and mass flight.” (P. 11.) Even more famous, of course, are the stories of Europeans coming to America. But Hamed-Troyansky notes there were really two major migratory waves: in one, white Europeans settled the American, African, and Pacific frontiers; in the other, the peoples they displaced were themselves compelled to settle elsewhere. “The North Caucasians’ migration,” Hamed-Troyansky suggests, “was both of these stories.” (P. 7.) The domino effect of displacement, flight, settlement, and displacement of others is a theme running through the book, and invites questions about how many other migration stories were “both.”
The Ottoman refugee system, however, aimed at more than just humanitarian resettlement; it was also designed to further state interests. Some of these were fairly benign, such as the desire to establish prosperous farms that could be taxed. But others were less so: as the Ottoman Empire’s power waned, its leaders learned “the importance of counting people to stake out territorial claims.” (P. 80.) The best way to hold territory in the face of European demands was to have large numbers of Muslims living there. And the North Caucasians were conveniently Muslim, an identity “which the government regarded as a guarantee of their loyalty to the Ottoman state.” (P. 80.) The Ottoman resettlement system thus aimed to establish Circassian communities in places where the empire wanted a more favorable demographic balance, especially against Christian minorities. This, too, has echoes today. Turkey, for example, has recently settled displaced Sunni Syrians in formerly Kurdish areas along its border, helping refugees but also drawing allegations of “demographic engineering”: replacing a local population seen as a security threat with one perceived as more reliable.3
At times the Ottoman state went further, aiming to reduce the “undesirable” population through population exchanges, deportations, and massacres. Some Muslim refugees played prominent roles in the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917), and the property of deported or murdered Christians was even handed over to refugee communities.4
Hamed-Troyansky’s story thus reveals an uncomfortable truth: “ethnic cleansing and refugee relief are imagined as polar opposites: one is a war crime…and the other is a humanitarian good,” but “[i]n reality, they often overlap.” (P. 85.) For the Ottoman state, helping North Caucasian victims of Russian abuses seamlessly gave way to using those victims to further its own abuses against others. This dimension of Hamed-Troyansky’s work is perhaps the most valuable for scholars of law and humanitarianism—his attention to the nuanced and often Janus-faced nature of sympathy for “the other.” Giving aid is never impartial and can be inextricably connected with doing harm to another, less sympathetic, “other.”
- Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (2011); Keith David Watenpaugh, The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927, 115 Am. Historical Rev. 1315–39 (2010).
- Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914 (2012).
- Sirwan Kajjo, Settlement Construction in Syrian District Renews Accusations of Demographic Engineering, Voice of America, Jan. 12, 2023.
- Ellinor Morack, The Dowry of the State? The Politics of Abandoned Property and the Population Exchange in Turkey, 1921-1945 (2017).
